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If you’re like me, you’ve gone through the past months waiting with baited breath for video updates about the upcoming The Hobbit release. Such a mass team effort on costumes, art, stage, and setting coming together is always an amazing thing, especially on such large-scale productions.

I was tickled pink when this gem popped up on my go-to video blog (if you can call it that) wimp.com, showing how Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings films made not-so-small actors appear as their halfling counterparts using the not-so modern technical magic of forced perspective.

While I couldn’t find a video for it (sorry guys), I also remember from the special features in the latest Star Trek film that J.J. Abrams also used forced perspective in a clever (and frugal) way by placing a barn in the background of a scene set in Kirk’s hometown. It was just a perfect scale miniature of a barn placed a distance away from the actors in the shot!

It’s always nice to know that even the creatives with monstrous budgets still make effective use of some of the simplest and cheapest tools in the game. Personally I find it inspiring that such easy things can have such high-quality results.